"There was a time when garbage was a pleasure," they sing in this musical version of Giraudoux's The Madwoman of Chaillot, which flopped on Broadway in 1969. Wickedly tempting as it might be to apply the line to the show itself, it would be unfair: it has a certain winsome charm, especially in Gillian Lynne's spruce and elegant production, which sits well in this intimate, 275-seat theatre.

Broadway eyebrows were raised when composer-lyricist Jerry Herman followed his big hits, Hello, Dolly! and Mame, with this excursion into French fantasy: in fact, all three shows are tributes to dominating female eccentrics. In this case, it is the self-styled Countess Aurelia, who deplores the grasping brutality of the modern world and who, when oil is supposedly discovered beneath the streets of Paris, lures a trio of corporate capitalists to their doom.

I've always had my doubts about the play, as it seems to whimsically sanction murder. But the addition of music turns the book by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E Lee into an extended piece of wish-fulfilment. Even if none of the numbers has become an extractable hit, both the title song and One Person fall pleasantly on the ear.

Betty Buckley, whom I last saw in Promises, Promises half a lifetime ago, lends the heroine the right air of dreamy dottiness, as if still inhabiting the Paris of the Belle Epoque. There is good support from Paul Nicholas as a benevolent sewerman, Peter Land as a leanly rapacious capitalist and Annabel Leventon as a park-bench habitue who hears more voices than Joan of Arc. It is not one of those Broadway failures like Sondheim's Anyone Can Whistle that quickly acquires cult status, but Lynne stylishly evokes a fantasy Paris, and it's hard not to warm to a show that suggests corporate greed and environmental destruction can be actively resisted.

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